I don't know if I am talking about the same poll that WWM2 refers to but the modelling on the More in Common poll - which gives Reform a 96 seat majority -is dubious anyway. It polled fewer than 20,000 people and used that data to represent 631 constituencies (excludes Northern Ireland).
It says:
How does the model account for those who don't know how they will vote?
^When we ask people their voting intention, some people say they don’t know. We push them to say who they would vote for if they were forced to choose, and we use this response as their expected vote. Some people, when asked to imagine that they were forced to choose, still don’t know who they would vote for.^
Using our MRP model, we’re able to make a better guess at how these double don’t knows might end up voting. When training the model to predict people’s voting intention based on their demographics, voting behaviour and information about their constituency, we excluded the responses of people who didn’t know who they would vote for (after the squeeze) from the training data. When we apply the model to all the voters in the constituency, it effectively means we estimate the votes of people who don’t know, according to how people like them (in terms of demographics and past voting behaviour) but who do know, intend to vote.
So if someone lives in a rural area, is over 75 and voted Conservative in 2024, the model uses the fact that most over 75s in rural areas who voted Conservative in 2024 and do know who they’ll vote for say they will vote Conservative, to guess that if they do vote it will likely be for the Conservatives.
*Is this a snapshot or a projection?*
With four and a half years before the next General Election must be called this model is unlikely to represent anything close to the ultimate result and should not be seen as a projection of the election.
As well as not knowing what might happen between now and 2029, we also don’t know which parties will stand in different seats, what tactical voting might look like exactly and who will ultimately turn out to vote. What’s more, the degree of electoral fragmentation makes individual seat dynamics even more difficult to project than previously.
Why does the model show X party winning in Y constituency?
^MRP models are a good way to estimate how the parties might perform across different constituencies based on their demographic makeup. However, they don’t account for local factors that impact a small number of constituencies, such as a popular incumbent, well known or controversial council policy. These factors make it difficult to predict exact vote shares even in the best of times, but even more so when three parties are polling at over 20%, making three-way races more common. Therefore it would be a mistake to draw too much from the estimated vote share in an individual constituency.^
And why are MiC they saying four and half years before the next election when the fieldwork was said to be done over six weeks in August and September 2025? The next general election must be called by August 2029.
A party needs at least 326 seats to have a HoC majority. In 2024, 46 seats were won with a margin of less than 2%.
I think we are more likely to end up with a hung parliament.
Presumably, it was intended as an insult and trying to imply we're all living in lalaland.